NICK CAVE AND THE BAD SEEDS
Murder Ballads (Reprise)
You have to ask what's wrong with society when an album like this comes out. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' latest offering, aptly titled Murder Ballads, is a dizzying journey that traverses the thin line between love and hate, tenderness and bloodthirstiness. For hundreds of years, the ballad form has been associated with themes of love turned tragically violent. Instead of revising the ballad's unsanitary and often misogynistic tendencies for a contemporary, politically correct audience, however, Cave and cohorts push the form to its sordid extremes-forget love, revel in the erotics of violence and domination.
At times, Cave sticks to traditionally structured ballad forms with simple melodies, endlessly repeated refrains, and familiar rhyme schemes. "Where the Wild Roses Grow" tells of a three-day courtship between an unnamed man and a woman named Elisa Day, whose "lips were the colour of the roses/That grew down the river, all bloody and wild." The man identifies Elisa's innocent sensuality with something violent and sanguinary. By the third day, the man kneels above her with a rock in his fist. "All beauty must die," he says as he kisses her dead body goodbye.
In "Lovely Creature," the narrator takes a night walk through the desert with the woman of the title, but when the journey is over, she is conspicuously absent. In the final verse, the narrator informs us that, "Somewhere she lies, this lovely creature/Beneath the slow drifting sands." The music is a bewildering mix of ominous bass droning, wailing organs, and periodic, ferocious stabs of guitar. Against this backdrop, soprano backing vocals and a woman's uncomfortable panting glide in when Cave's narration slips out.
At times, Cave swaggers through first-person-narrative killing sprees. The sexual violence gets really graphic in these instances. In "O'Malley's Bar," the narrator walks into the pub of the title and promptly begins to shoot everyone in it. The entire event is a power game for the narrator, who admits, after his first kill, that his "dick felt long and hard." In "Stagger Lee," the stakes are similar, and they turn overtly sexual halfway through the song. A man named Stagger Lee struts into a bar and shoots the barkeep. An impressed prostitute invites Lee to her place, with the caution that he must leave before her man, Billy Dilly, returns. When Billy does return, Lee demands oral sex from him. In the final verse, Billy complies, and when Cave sings, "Stag filled him full of lead," it is unclear what kind of gun he is using.
The final verdict on Murder Ballads, however, depends not on its twisted narratives. Cave's attempt to offer a unified vision through violent, erotic ballad forms must have usurped the entire project, because it apparently left him unable to give as much attention to the musical side of his work. Cave and the Bad Seeds' recordings have steadily gotten cleaner, but despite a few notable guest appearances by PJ Harvey and Shane MacGowan, Cave and company can't seem to keep the ship musically afloat. Cave's voice is recorded flatly and often a notch too loud compared to his accompaniments, which themselves are often very thin-steady rhythm tracks punctuated by stabs of piano, organ, and guitar. Past Bad Seeds records have been dense, menacing walls of sound; musically, Murder Ballads could be run over by any of their earlier efforts. After all the shootings and stabbings narrated by Cave, the most unfortunate murder is of a potentially powerful and lasting album.
-I-Huei Go
Copyright 1996, The Yale Herald, Inc. All rights reserved.
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